It is during this time of great confusion, that we must make the most of our surroundings in new and creative ways. Come with me, if you will, to a place of great excitement that is aged to perfection. It’s the Utica Club: a hazy and happenin’ spot, tinted by psychedelia and the promise of a far-out future. And all it takes is the crack of a beer.
 
The straight corporate suits have been trying to earn the respect of one counter-culture revolutionary since they began teaching it in universities. Some of the hippies even fell for it. During the radical late 60’s, just about anyone with long hair and an out-of-sight sense of freedom could pass as a child of this new wave of thinking.
 
Random beer fact: Utica Club was the first beer that was sold when Prohibition ended in 1933. Imagine how good it must have tasted that night. Which is funny, because online reviews for the cheap lager describe it as tasting like shit. Regardless, they sure knew their demographic. Early ads by the brewery featured the lovable Schultz and Dooley, bumbling beer steins and regional ambassadors to the watery brew. One of company taglines was “We drink all we can - the rest we sell.”

Utica television spot from the 60s
 

Commercial exploring the emerging beatnik culture
 
In 1968, something was really happen’ in the American underground and Utica Club really needed the beatniks to think their beer was hip. They hired ad agency Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc, who brilliantly conceived the fantasy of Utica Club - a mythical mod nightclub of kaleidoscopic delight. Think Laugh-In meets the Electric Pussycat Swingers Club from the first Austin Powers. Jingle composer Sascha Burland (know for creating the Nutty Squirrels, notorious Chipmunks rip-off) and Chicago garage rock band The Trolls wrote the soundtrack to this youthful setting, summed up as the “Utica Club Natural Carbonation Band Beer Drinking Song.”
 

 
The song was included in a series of television ads that ran throughout upstate New York. It featured partygoers sneaking around the Utica Beer Brewery looking for a taste of the nightlife. Later they would discover that one could only achieve the vibe by twisting open a cold one. Thousands of promotional 45s with the theme song were given away to brewery visitors during the era, as a reminder of where Utica Club can take you.
 
The back cover to the record described the dreamlike utopia as follows:
 

There’s nothing totally sane about The Utica Club. Waitresses slide down fireman’s poles. Life-sized paintings come to life. A friendly gorilla’s in charge of the swings. You know the ones that hang from the ceilings. With girls on them.

 
I’ll have what they’re having.
 
h/t WFMU
 

 
Did you know that the banana was a berry? Yep. Me neither. I also had zero clue that the US was gifted the concept of fish sticks from the Soviet Union as a post-war food. I mean—seriously—what? After reading Christina Ward’s thoroughly enjoyable and informative book American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas and Jell-O, I have now realized that the sum total of what I knew about food history before I encountered this volume could have fit neatly inside a deviled egg.
 

 
From wealthy people renting exotic fruit like pineapples (before pineapples were readily available) as a dinner table centerpiece to flaunt their class status, to kitchen technology, diet recipes and the development and evolution of canned and potted meats, this book covers a variety of topics that handle far more than “what’s on the plate.” More often than not, Ward’s book is a textbook of incisive connections between invisible or overlooked histories and what is now commonly considered kitsch imagery.
 

 
Each chapter of American Advertising Cookbooks is different and equally rewarding. From the design of the book to the writing and image content, it never fails to educate and entertain in tandem. Images of a recipe for “SPAM ‘n’ Macaroni Loaf” and advertisements for a 1969 Pillsbury meat cookbook are delightfully placed perfectly next to chunks of text discussing the government’s Meat Inspection Act and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, allowing the reader to gain insight and react to the dark humor.

To authentically work with content that a younger generation might adore for a “so bad it’s good” angle or for its camp possibilities is not easy, but this book does it gracefully and with a level of respect for the topic that is obvious. Works like these are harder as many tend to go for the easy laugh or quick sell based on surface nostalgia. Ward’s attitude towards this material is wholly different and that is what makes this book so brilliant. She skillfully places dozens upon dozens of beautifully printed “weirdo” images into historical context giving Ham Banana rolls, Piquant Turkey Loaf and Perfection Salad a whole new life!
 

 
Foods that modern audiences no longer consume in large (or any) quantities like packaged meats and gelatins make them seem very foreign. But today’s food preservation techniques are different. Hey, refrigeration, what’s up? Indeed, many people I’ve met may think aspics look disgusting. I honestly looked at many of these images and saw so much art and dignity put forth in their representation. While this wasn’t something actively discussed, there is no way that one could view all these images and not see people trying to make these dishes look appetizing. Sure, Creative Cooking with Cottage Cheese may not have the same appeal as watching Anthony Bourdain but the Up North Salmon Supper looks really good. And there is something to be said about class aesthetics here. The idea of a home-cooked meal and working-class values is something that Christina Ward most certainly focuses on in the writing, making this book extra gratifying to some of us old school class-consciousness punk activist-y types!

If the mind-blowing plethora of elegant and fastidiously researched recipes, adverts and book covers seems odd or silly to a reader, they are clearly not looking at what a quality piece of literature this book is. Ward’s thorough research, accessible discussions on colonialism, Puritan and Calvinist practices, racism as a marketing ploy (Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben anyone?), and the Christian Missionary connection to, well, fruit make American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas and Jell-O a necessary addition to anyone’s library who is interested in food, US history, social politics or simply a damn good book.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
When I was young, my mom gifted me a subscription to Dog Fancy magazine. It was definitely one of those scenarios that sounds great in theory, enriching even - until the back-issues begin piling up. Oh great, another one? Add it to the stack… I still have about a year’s worth of The New Yorker sitting under my bed. I’ll get to it.
 
The main reason why I was a subscriber of Dog Fancy wasn’t because, at age eight, I wanted to learn the ins-and-outs of the cutthroat canine industry. It was because I thought my two Shetland Sheepdogs would enjoy it. But, guess what? They could not have cared less. I mean, Dog Fancy is sooo “basic.” It’s like a dog reading Martha Stewart Living. Sure, my dogs could barely see, but at least they had class.
 
Years later, I discovered that there had been a few late-eighties parody magazines, specifically Canine Quarterly and Dogue, written for the classy, sophisticated dog of the modern American home. Although cleverly tongue-in-cheek, the content within is presented in an entirely serious manner, as if its audience was wholly made up of trendy, upscale pooches. Topics range from your typical leisure digest fare - relationships, diet, style, travel, home, and fitness. There’s a cover story on Spuds MacKenzie (Bud Light mascot and the “Original Party Animal”), a section on dream doghouses, hound-friendly dinner recipes, canine couture, pet horoscopes, and a gift guide for their favorite human. It is truly, as they say, “paw-some.”
 

 
The most rewarding thing about picking up a copy of Dogue or CQ are its advertisements - mostly just spoofs on popular clothing brands, jewelry, and cosmetics. It is very clear that the author had a lot of fun creating these, especially since a number of other similar satire publications had popped up in the years surrounding, like Cowsmopolitan, Playboar, Vanity Fur, Good Mousekeeping, and Catmopolitan. Just don’t purchase any of these thinking your pet would be interested in reading - it still isn’t food.
 
Take a look at some of the most clever advertisements and other photos from ‘Canine Quarterly’ and ‘Dogue,’ below:
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Unleashed upon the world in the same year as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Blade Runner, the Disney production Tron may not have been the best sci-fi movie ever made, but it was certainly among the most stylish. For tweens who desperately wanted to know what it might be like to live inside the Pac-Man console down at the local “arcade”—1982 being a very big year for that particular game as well—Tron was definitely the flick for that craving.

Tron had assets aside from its production design, however. The movie may not have been designed to take particular advantage of the considerable charm of Jeff Bridges, later seen in his indelible performances as the Dude, Rooster Cogburn, and Otis “Bad” Blake, but you can’t really argue with that casting choice, and in David Warner the movie had that moment’s most deliciously malevolent baddie (also appearing as Evil itself in Time Bandits and as Jack the Ripper in Time After Time).

These promo shots and/or production stills are amusing primarily for forcing the actors involved (Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan prominently among them) to do without the blue glow of the post-production special effects, revealing them to be a passel of California actors doing that make-believe that sometimes pays so very well. Enjoy ‘em.
 

 

 

 
Tons more after the jump….....
 

 
In 1989 Jean Giraud, or Moebius as he is universally known in the comix world, accepted an assignment from the Paris office of Young & Rubicam. The client was Maxwell House coffee, and the job called for a series of advertisements that would appear in French magazines. The images correlated roughly to what we would today call “a New Yorker cartoon” but they also overflowed with the exacting, unmistakable, visionary touch of Moebius, collaborator of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and Luc Besson.

Moebius completed six images for Young & Rubicam but only four were actually used in magazines. The theme of the advertisements was “Grain de Folie,” which translates to something like “a touch of madness.” The purpose of the campaign appears to have been to convince French womankind that a coffee during the daytime might be seen as a proper activity or even a reward for completed tasks, as we shall see.

The heroine of the series was “Tatiana,” a self-possessed and fashionable young woman who happens to find herself alone on a deserted jungle island or the like. Rather than display a shred of panic, unflappable Tatiana instead demurely sips her cup of Maxwell House coffee, a cup that invariably is defined as a tiny expanse of white in an otherwise completely yellow image. Tatiana is so utterly capable that even the considerable threats of the jungle are reduced (in the caption, we find) to the everyday trials of suburban domesticity. Or something.

Here are two rather grainy images of the ads more or less in action. Note that you can see a small amount of white space to indicate where the center of the image would be, in the two-page spread of a magazine. (Better images—and translations—are supplied further down, never fear.)
 

 

 
Moebius fans have been aware of these images for quite a while. In 1991, just two years after the campaign, French artist Numa Sadoul included them in a book called Mœbius: Entretiens avec Numa Sadoul. A few years later they were printed in a limited run as Coffee Dreams, the 5th issue of Ashcan Comics, a series dedicated to Moebius rarities.
 

 
That issue, which was limited to just 100 copies, fetches $500 in online auction sites today—which is true of all of the Ashcan Comics that I was able to find.

Here are better-quality pics with proper captions so that you can enjoy the full effect of these indelible Moebius images:
 

Ce petit break fut un soulangement pour Tatiana qui se lassait tant de ces blablas intellos. (The little break was a relief for Tatiana, who was sick and tired of all the intellectual blah-blah.)

 
More Moebius after the jump…

 
Season 4 of Better Call Saul, which wrapped up a few weeks ago, is on the shortlist of my favorite seasons of television ever. The Emmy people have not shown Better Call Saul undue respect—it has never won a single Emmy for anything—but in my view the Vince Gilligan/Peter Gould creation is running rings around every other show in a bunch of different ways. It’s got the best acting, the best writing, and the best direction, for starters. Particularly in the writing arena, it’s a little preposterous that any other drama would beat Better Call Saul, at least that’s my opinion.

One of the amusing aspects of Better Call Saul is that it showcases so many different depictions of excellence in its narrative. Jimmy McGill (later to become Saul Goodman) is a world-class con artist, his brother Chuck is a genius-level attorney, Mike Ehrmantraut is an unusually gifted all-purpose security dude, Gustavo Fring is a regional/international drug kingpin of distinction, and Jimmy’s girlfriend Kim is a pretty gifted negotiator of plea deals and the like as a sideline to her regular gig of representing multinational corporations (with Jimmy, she also grifts unwitting saps for fun). The show has a deep abiding interest in professionalism and excellence in all of its forms.
 

 
As portrayed by Jonathan Banks, the utterly unflappable Mike Ehrmantraut has become the object of no small fascination. I know several people who’d swap places with him in an instant, given the option. Until he landed the role of Mike in Breaking Bad, Banks was a respected if by no means famous character actor whose notable credits had included the TV series Wiseguy and the movies Freejack and Gremlins.

One of Banks’ early credits was a bizarre self-help videotape from 1985 called You Can Win! Negotiating for Power, Love and Money. The videotape was intended to showcase the penetrating insights of a lady named Dr. Tessa Albert Warschaw. I’m guessing that You Can Win! was tolerably successful in its day—before most everyone had the ability to call up life advice on the Internet—for as recently as 2015 she was appearing at a TEDxPasadenaWomen event discussing the importance of resiliency.

In You Can Win! Banks is given the task of portraying the idealized “type” of “the Dictator,” the unpleasant, exacting prig who has precise expectations in every interaction. The video alternates between explanations from Dr. Warschaw and demonstrations of the insights by a team of NYC actors who are really not bad at all, the whole thing is really fairly good but just horribly dated. Skip through it for the bits involving Banks (who knows, you might have a use for a clip of Banks saying the words “Massage! ... ha ha ha ha ha ha, don’t be perverse”). But mainly it’s best to think of it as a highly bizarre conceptual play.
 

 
via r/ObscureMedia
 

 
There’s a fellow out there named Todd Alcott who has put together an enchanting series of prints reimagining popular songs by some of the most vital musical artists of the 1970s through the 1990s as various graphical items mostly dating from before the rock era—e.g., pulpy paperbacks, “men’s life” mags, lurid sci-fi posters, and so on. They’re quite wonderful and you can procure them for yourself in his Etsy store. Each print will run you £19.78 (about $26) for the smallest size and prices escalate from there.

One endearing thing about Alcott’s images is that they are so clearly driven by the most beloved albums in his own collection—and his taste is excellent! So he transforms multiple songs by King Crimson, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, the Stones, David Bowie while also hitting a bunch of other faves (NIN, Nirvana, Fiona Apple) just the one time.

Alcott told Ayun Halliday of Open Culture that “these are the artists I love, I connect to their work on a deep level, and I try to make things that they would see and think ‘Yeah, this guy gets me.’”

My favorite thing about these pop culture mashups is Alcott’s insistence (usually) on working in as many of the song’s lyrics into the art as possible. That does admittedly make for busy compositions but usually in a way that is very true to the pulp novel conventions or whatnot.

According to his Etsy site, Alcott is also available for custom jobs should inspiration strike you! Here
 
More of these marvelous images after the jump…...
 

 
Nothing says savory, fried chicken goodness quite like a forced interrogation of Colonel Sanders, does it? At least that’s what some aspiring Don Draper convinced the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain’s iconic founder for this pretty out there TV spot: Associate your food with Cold War paranoia!

Good thing they passed up on waterboarding him, they’d have probably gotten the Colonel’s secret recipe out of him, pronto.
 

 
And then there’s this one. Does anything quite convey the notion of “Hey, relax, take it easy, save the dishes and serve the family some fried chicken tonight!” quite like air raid sirens and a finger beckoning you to get into a manhole that opens up in your kitchen? I didn’t think so.
 

 

With Alice Cooper

And of course, there’s nothing that sells chickeny goodness quite like implied nudity in the Lady Godiva-themed spot, after the jump…

 
Tom Waits is in some sense the poster boy for the notion of willful independence from the clutches of corporations tempting musical artists with advertising moolah. Waits isn’t just known for not doing commercials, he famously filed suit against Frito-Lay and its advertising agency Tracy-Locke in 1988 after the mega-manufacturer of salty treats ran a commercial in which a man named Stephen Carter mimicked Waits’ unmistakably gravelly voice intoning the familiar patter of “Step Right Up,” only in this case adapted to alert viewers to the charms of its new product, SalsaRio Doritos.

Waits alerted his attorneys with alacrity—four years later he was rewarded with a whopping settlement of $2.6 million.

It might surprise you to learn, then, that Waits actually did voluntarily make his gravelly voice available for a large corporation for a commercial—one single, solitary time.

In 1981 Waits did the voiceover for a commercial for Purina Butcher’s Blend Dog Food. Here’s the text Waits was required to read:
 

As dog travels through the envied and often tempting world of man, there’s one thing, above all, that tempts him most…the taste of meat! And that is why Purina makes Butcher’s Blend. Butcher’s Blend is the first dry dog food with three tempting meaty tastes. Beef, liver, ‘n’ bacon. All in one bag. So c’mon, deliver your dog from the world of temptation. The world of Butcher’s Blend. The first dry dog food with three meaty tastes.

 
The gig didn’t pay $2.6 million but it surely put a spring into Waits’ step. The period right after 1980’s Heartattack and Vine was a heady one for Waits in that he not only ended his association with Asylum and joined forces with Island but he also somewhat acrimoniously dumped his manager, Herb Cohen. After making the decision to manage his own career (with his wife and artistic partner Kathleen Brennan) and also without his old label for the first time in almost a decade, it would be understandable for Waits to undergo a process of searching and also at least dip his toe into the advertising waters.
 

 
Waits has never seriously attempted to deny that the Butchers Blend commercial happened. In his book Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, Barney Hoskyns quotes Waits as saying, “I was down on my luck. And I’ve always liked dogs.” Of Cohen, Waits said pungently that he had “gotten rid of my ex-manager and a lot of the flesh-peddlers and professional vermin I’d thrown in with.” (Captain Beefheart once said that Cohen reminded him of “a red marble in a can of lard.”)

Flush with SalsaRio Doritos simoleons, Waits could later afford to develop his (surely sincere) opposition to letting advertisers run roughshod all over musical artists. It wasn’t just Frito-Lay Waits took on, after all, not by a long shot. Waits has also tussled with the likes of Levi’s, MP3.com, and Audi whenever they threatened to use his likeness or vocal uniqueness in a manner of which Waits did not approve.

In 1999, during an interview conducted by Jonathan Valania of Magnet magazine, Waits made an oblique reference to his experience of selling his voice to Butchers Blend. Asked if he is truly “Big in Japan,” as the title of a new song (at the time) had it, Waits replied:
 

Haven’t played there in a long time. Last time I was there, I was on a bullet train, had my little porkpie hat, my pointed shoes and my skinny tie. There was a whole car of Japanese gangsters dressed like Al Capone and Cagney, really zooted. Everyone says, “Don’t go in there, don’t go in there,” but it was the only place with seats - everybody else was huddled together like cattle. And they are in this huge air-conditioned car, with tea and little cookies and six guys sitting around talking with cigars. I said, “Fuck, I’m gonna go in there and sit down.” And I did. It was like this big, heavy stand-off, then they all started laughing, we all tipped our hats and did that little bow. It was pretty funny. Then I brought my guys in and we all sat down, my mob with the Japanese mob. They always want me to do ads for underwear and cigarettes, but I never did them. I did one and I’ll never do it again. I used to see celebrities doing ads and my first reaction was, “Aw, gee he must have needed the money. That’s tough.” When somebody was on the slide, they would do an ad.

   
 
Continues after the jump…

 
Milton Glaser was one of the major graphic designers of the postwar era in America and he’s still very active today, at the age of 88. He co-founded New York magazine, created one of the most iconic images of Bob Dylan, and came up with a brand identity for New York City in the 1970s that was so effective it is still recognizable and in use today.

Abrams Books recently published a marvelous overview of Glaser’s career in the poster medium, with the informative title Milton Glaser Posters: 427 Examples from 1965 to 2017. The book, which is about the size of a paperback novel, has an intuitive format with the images on the right-hand side and Glaser’s terse but candid commentary on the left. (It’s also priced to move.)

Below are some representative images from the book along with Glaser’s remarks.

Big Nudes (1966)

“Except for the Dylan poster and the ‘I Love New York’ campaign, this School of Visual Arts poster announcing a show of paintings of large nudes seems to be my best-known work. The graphic idea was to show a nude so large it couldn’t fit on the page, extending into the space beyond the poster. Later, I did a large silkscreen of the same drawing that continues to sell like hotcakes.”
 

Dylan (1967)

“This poster, included with the 1967 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits album, is probably the best-known work of mine, with the exception of the ‘I Love New York’ identity campaign. Why certain works become iconic is not easily understood, but here the celebrity of the subject is certainly part of the story.”
 

Milton Glaser Exhibition (1976)

“This stylized nude was done for a show of my work in Belgium. Although it is limited in color, it has a powerful graphic effect. For budgetary reasons, there were only two colors available for the poster. By printing the green over the red, we created the black form––a powerful image, largely due to the limitation of color.”

More after the jump…